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Romney on Jobs

Greg Sargent has been demanding that Mitt Romney be held accountable for two claims that he makes about jobs: (1) That Obama has been a job-destroyer (2) that he, Romney, created 100,000 jobs at Bain.

Well, some results on claim #2: Glenn Kessler gets a Romney person to explain, and it turns out that he’s looking at the expansion of employment by three companies that Bain was involved with, and we get this:

Fehrnstrom says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs).

This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain.

So if something good happens, even if it’s long after Romney was at Bain, it’s Romney’s achievement. If something bad happens, even if it’s in a company that Bain took over when Romney was there, never mind. By that standard, everyone who’s spent a lot of time with slot machines is a big winner, since only the pluses count.

So Romney wants to count all those losses in the early months of the Obama administration, before any of the new president’s policies had gone into effect, as belonging to Obama — as opposed to being something related to the economy in free fall that Obama inherited.

But there’s something else I forgot to mention. During the Bush years there was a constant drumbeat of boasting about all the jobs Bush had created. Created since when? The answer, always, was since June 2003 — the low point of the decade. Implicitly, Bush disavowed responsibility for the first two and a half years of his time in office.

One more interesting fact: even if you only count the good times, between June 2003 and the coming of the Great Recession, the economy was creating only 148,000 jobs a month. That seems relevant, since Romney’s economic policy is basically a return to Bushism. Job growth at a similar rate now would bring us back to full employment sometime in the 2020s.